Wiña jai! - 13 new reviews this week
- 3 Criterions including the first ever Eclipse Series release, 2 X 5-film boxsets
and 5 DVD comparisons. Another mass of
Calendar UPDATES.
Part of the reason for our TOP 100 DESERT ISLAND DVDs
listwas to help parse collections down (this is what I am trying
to do) but with so much new stuff every week it is an ongoing battle to
determine those worthy enough to keep 'in the library'. There are many contenders reviewed this
week - Bergman, Dassin, Ulmer's best, del Toro, Zhang, Cuarón, Sang-soo Hong and
more...

PUSHED BACK (uhhh ohh - here
we go again): Godard's Histoire (s) du
cinéma
is pushed back
to June 26th, 2007 (that's 3 more months!?!) and still has ENGLISH SUBS CONFIRMED!

STRATEGIES:
The best way to take full advantage of Amazon is to use PRE-ORDERs
- lock in at the discount price by ORDERING - if perchance you
decide against the purchase you have until the release date to
cancel - at no charge.

AND if you will purchase
more than 35 DVDs (or anything) in a 365 day period (and live in
the Continental US) it makes excellent financial sense to
subscribe to Amazon Prime! You will get Free 2-day
shipping on your purchases!

RECOMMENDATIONS: Although we don't recommend the new Paramount (FR)
edition that we have added to our comparison -
Detour, with all its flaws, is still, most
probably, my favorite Noir film of all time. But not too far
behind is Dassin and Hellinger's
Brute
Force. Criterion have, once again risen to the challenge with a
stacked release chock-full of keen appreciation. Homo-erotic and anti-facist
sentiments in full tow!

INAUGURAL: Eclipse Series 1 is
even better than one might anticipate from their mission statement.
Early
Bergman shows that Criterion's second tier is superior to most
DVD companies top shelf. It is a fabulous deal and highly recommended !

COMPLETE PACKAGE:
Criterion's (new director commentary and 2-disc SE)
La Haine
is possibly the most complete DVD package of the year to date.

ALL WE WERE EXPECTING...:
del Toro's
Pan's Labyrinth is quite a ride. One that
fans of its fairy-tale-fantasy elements will surely relish.

REGION ONE WINS THIS BATTLE:
With all the extras and at the best price - the NTSC edition of
Children of Men is the one to purchase.

IMPROVEMENT RECOGNIZED: Ny'er
have excelled in the area of supplements and the extras put out in Woman is the Future of Man on are very
much appreciated! Great job Cindi, Brian and co.!

New Reviews:

Woman is the Future of Man - The title of Hong's comedy of manners and
mores, taken from a Louis Aragon poem, is gently misleading: the woman here,
bar-owner Sun-Hwa (Sung), is actually a figure from the pasts of the two men,
aspiring film-maker Kim (Kim) and university lecturer Lee (Yu). As usual, Hong
loads the film with neat symmetries and patterns of repetition/variation, but
there's less formalist play with narrative structures than before. (Maybe the
French co-producer's demand for cuts forced him to axe some of his ideas this
time?) Still, it's funny, wry and emotionally acute. DVD Release Date: March
27th, 2007

La Haine
- When he was just twenty-nine years old, Mathieu Kassovitz took the
international film world by storm with La haine (Hate), a gritty, unsettling,
and visually explosive look at the racial and cultural volatility in modern-day
France, specifically in the low-income banlieue districts on Paris’s outskirts.
Aimlessly whiling away their days in the concrete environs of their dead-end
suburbia, Vinz (Vincent Cassel), Hubert (Hubert Koundé), and Saïd (Saïd
Taghmaoui)—a Jew, an African, and an Arab—give human faces to France’s immigrant
populations, their bristling resentment at their social marginalization slowly
simmering until they reach a climactic boiling point. A work of tough beauty, La
haine is a landmark of contemporary French cinema and a gripping reflection of
its country’s ongoing identity crisis. DVD Release Date: April 17th, 2007

Brute
Force - As hard-hitting as its title, Brute Force was the first of Jules
Dassin’s forays into the crime genre, a prison melodrama that takes a critical
look at American society as well. Burt Lancaster is the timeworn Joe Collins,
who, along with his fellow inmates, lives under the heavy thumb of the sadistic,
power-tripping guard Captain Munsey (a riveting Hume Cronyn). Only Collins’s
dreams of escape keep him going, but how can he possibly bust out of Munsey’s
chains? Matter-of-fact and ferocious, Brute Force builds to an explosive climax
that shows the lengths men will go to when fighting for their freedom. DVD
Release Date: April 17th, 2007

Detour
- The kind of film (made in six days, almost entirely in a Poverty Row studio,
its extensive road scenes shot with back projection) that would be impossible to
make today, even as a TV movie. Now it would require 100% locations (the 'art'
of studio shooting having been discredited and thus lost), and the minimal
narrative would never justify a go-ahead (pianist Neal is bumming from New York
to rejoin his girl in California until tripped by hostile fate and the literally
amazing femme fatale Savage). Neither pure thriller nor pure melodrama (though
it has its true complement of doomed lovers, dead bodies, and a cruel sexual
undertow), on an emotional level it most resembles the wonderful purple-pulp
fiction of David Goodis. Passion joins with folly to produce termite art par
excellence.

Pan's Labyrinth - The labyrinth has echoes of authentic atrocity: a pile
of children’s shoes lies ominously near the banqueting table of a bald-bodied,
blank-faced baby-eater. At least as evident, though, is del Toro’s own immersion
in fantasy and horror cinema, with nods to ‘Don’t Look Now’, ‘Rosemary’s Baby’
and ‘The Shining’ among others (not to mention Goya and ‘The Spirit of the
Beehive’). It’s as a filmmaker, rather than storyteller, that del Toro is most
successful here: a disjunction remains between the story’s childlike form and
its gruesome execution, but few directors are so adept at conveying both the
uncanny in the real and the recognizable in the fantastic. DVD Release Date:
March 12th, 2007

The Errol Flynn Signature Collection, Vol. 2 - Along with
volume 1 of
"The Errol Flynn Signature Collection" this entry makes for a pretty strong
collection of the most formidable swashbuckler (inherited from Douglas
Fairbanks) of the silver screen's quintessential performances with both "The
Charge of the Light Brigade" and "The Adventures of Don Juan" being absolutely
essential to the list. All five are helmed by high quality directors - Edmund Goulding, Raoul Walsh, Vincent Sherman and two by Michael Curtiz. These films
represent a golden-age for Hollywood adventure epics. Films are The Charge of
the Light Brigade (1936), The Dawn Patrol (1938), Dive Bomber (1941), Gentleman
Jim (1942) and Adventures of Don Juan (1948). DVD Release Date: March 27th,
2007

Jesse
James - The first film on the notorious James brothers that attempted
historical authenticity led to dozens more on the subject. It sets out, in a
rather sprawling manner, to prove that the outlaws were wronged. (Jesse's
granddaughter is given a research credit.) According to this version, they were
defenders of a rural Southern Arcadia against Northern capitalism, represented
by banks and railways, becoming outlaws only after killing the man trying to
force their mother off their land. There is some splendid Technicolor
photography, and Power's and Fonda's performances as Jesse and Frank, and Scott
as the sheriff, are superb. DVD Release Date: March 6th, 2007

Curse of the Golden Flower - The movie follows the destruction of the
imperial family in the Tang Dynasty. In this world, everybody has secrets, but
everybody knows everything. The transparency of formality and normalcy has to
override all the double-crossing and personal agendas. The odd thing is that
nobody would ever know about these secrets because even if revealed they would
never leave the palace walls. The movie takes place completely inside the palace
walls, save for one small sequence, where the emperor decides to tie some loose
ends. What do you do when you want to keep secrets that, when exposed, wouldn’t
change anything? The outer layer is a lot more important than the inside. DVD
Release Date: March 27, 2007

Children of Men - Set in 2027, Alfonso Cuarón's dystopian button-pusher
Children of Men, adapted from a novel by P.D. James, posits a world in which
women have mysteriously gone barren, so that the youngest human beings on the
planet are now in their late teens. It is a world without hope, without
vitality, without a future — and also, presumably, without anyone to man the
cash registers at Taco Bell and the Gap. But so intent are Cuarón and his
phalanx of screenwriters (five are credited) upon making glib visual reference
to current events that they toss all logic aside, clumsily superimposing their
own concerns onto James' blatant Christian allegory. And so we get nightmarish
images of illegal aliens herded into cages, even though a moment's thought
suggests that immigration would be the least of a depopulated society's worries.
In this fashionable context, global infertility functions strictly as a plot
device — a means of pushing various ill-defined characters through a bevy of
contemporary sociopolitical bugaboos. DVD Release Date: March 27th, 2007

Early
Bergman - Before The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries established him
as one of the great masters of cinema, Ingmar Bergman created a series of less
well known, devastating psychological character studies, marked by intricate,
layered narratives, gritty environments, and haunting visuals. These early
films, which show the stirrings of the genius to come, remain the hidden
treasures of a European cinema on the cusp of a golden age. Films included; Torment
(1944), Crisis (1946), Port of Call (1948), Thirst (1949) and To Joy (1949).
DVD Release Date: March 27th, 2007

OT: Our
Town - The documentary about inner-city kids performing a play has
become a distinct sub-genre of its own in recent years (“Colors Straight Up” and
“The Hobart Shakespeareans” are two examples) and Kennedy’s movie hews to the
emerging formula: initial enthusiasm fades into chaos and near disaster but
everyone eventually unites to surmount all obstacles and deliver a triumphant
performance that pleases the parents even if it doesn’t send Hollywood talent
scouts scurrying to the phones.

School For Scoundrels - School for Scoundrels is yet another
primitive-idiots movie from Todd Phillips, the man responsible for Old School.
(I guess Mr. Phillips likes educational settings.) In School for Scoundrels, Jon
Heder plays a loser who takes secret classes from a con artist played by Billy
Bob Thornton. In the classes, Thornton instructs his pupils on how to “act like
men” and “take what they want”. This ultimately involves--what else?--getting a
woman into bed.

Roast of William Shatner - Cable channel Comedy Central saw fit to add
Shatner to its list of roastees, and the Roast of William Shatner is a chance
for Trekkies to see Shatner, Nichelle Nichols (Uhura), and George Takei (Sulu)
together for possibly one last time. The three spew outrageous jokes about each
other. Not meaning to sound politically-incorrect, I must admit that some of the
program’s best jokes involve George Takei’s homosexuality. Unfortunately, most
of the roast is rather boring and even downright lame. DVD Release Date: 20
March 2007